Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday March 25, 2008 @05:53AM
from the because-it's-my-last-kilometer-that's-why dept.

knorthern knight writes "The Canadian family-run ISP Teksavvy (which is popular among Canadian P2P users precisely because it does not throttle P2P) has started noticing that Bell Canada is throttling traffic before it reaches wholesale partners. According to Teksavvy CEO Rocky Gaudrault, Bell has implemented 'load balancing' to 'manage bandwidth demand' during peak congestion times — but apparently didn't feel the need to inform partner ISPs or customers. The result is a bevy of annoyed customers and carriers across the great white north."

This isn't specifically throttling p2p traffic. It's using a proxy load balancing system to spread the load during peak hours which may lead to congestion. ISP's all over the world do it, in Australia the 2nd and 3rd biggest ISP's - Optus and TPG both implement transparent proxies for load balancing.

Obviously doing it before the traffic reaches wholesalers is a tad unethical, and I'm not condoning it, but the issue shouldn't be confused with specifically targeting p2p traffic.

All my other utilities have tired/metered service - electricity, water, even the phone (10 cents per call). Why should the internet utility be the sole exception? I suggest the following solution:

- $15 a month for economy service (~50 gigs limit)- $30 a month for standard service (~200 gigs limit)- $45 a month for premium service (~500 gigs limit)- $100 a month for unlimited

That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers (albeit with differing dollar amounts). And yes I think that's entirely fair. The more you download, the more you should pay, because you are hogging more bandwidth than I am.

And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.

Or better yet how about time of day service like electricity. If I download in off peak hours my rates per gig would be lower than when downloading during peak hours. If you don't download at all you just pay the base amount for keeping service.

Actually, that's exactly what Teksavvy (the ISP mentioned in the summary) already does (though they don't have as many levels as you suggest, but they add in the twist of additional per gigabyte charges once you exceed your monthly limit).

They who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly as soon as services started selling unlimited service.

And it's not "fair" as you put it. We already pay for tiered service. Downloaders usually want faster speed, so they pay more money. We pay different amounts of money for different connection speeds. Adding bandwidth tiers on top of that will turn ISP billing into a horrible mess that is almost impossible for consumers to understand. When that happens, expect the ISPs to start finding ways to screw the consumer by tacking on extra fees for this and that until we end up with something as horrible as cell phone billing is now....

Besides, your plans have lots of problems:

With the current throttling, high bandwidth users (who pay way more than $15 per month) are probably being kept below that 50 gig limit as it is, so the tiers you propose aren't financially any better for ISPs than what we have now.

Most users are going to quickly outgrow any tiers you offer. Those few downloaders are just a bellwether. They are the early adopters of movie download services, which are starting to pick up in use among consumers. That's pretty important to understand. A lot more people are going to be in those upper tiers soon.

Commercial movie download services are going to have a much harder time getting business if users start finding that they have to pay higher fees because they downloaded too many movies in a month. That's a serious enough problem to basically kill this nascent industry. Ditto when game developers start shifting to a download model in a few years. The absolute last thing software and media developers want is this tiered access you are describing, as it would result in a very substantial hit to their sales.

Metered billing for ISPs is a terrible idea. Period. It causes more problems than it solves. ISPs are simply going to have to stop lying to their customers and actually be honest about how much bandwidth they are really providing for the money. As I said yesterday on this same topic, the only acceptable tier system is one that gives people lower priority for bulk downloads so that those transfer don't interfere with casual web surfers' usage, but does so on a continuously-updated basis and does not cut the bulk downloads any more than is absolutely necessary. Description here [slashdot.org].

>>>"We used to have tiered service. Consumers rejected it soundly"False. Consumers did not reject "per gigabyte" tiers because no such animal has ever existed within the U.S. Some of the ISPs had time limits, but never gigabyte limits (you could download as much as you wanted).

Also, tiers based upon speed have proved themselves to be inoperative, because the professional liars.... er, salespeople exaggerate. They sell 10 megabit and then backwards-kludge it to 1 megabit through limits.

>>>"Commercial movie download services are going to have a much harder time getting business if users start finding that they have to pay higher fees because they downloaded too many movies in a month."Yes.

Oh well. (shrug) If downloading movies requires a $100 a month "unlimited gigabytes" connection, thus making DVDs a cheaper option for customers, so be it. That's the free market in action, where one type of product (downloading) competes with another type of product (dvd) for consumer dollar

Properly tiered billing is much better for the consumer (and the provider).-You can pay for a fast speed, but just 5 gigs per month (if all you do is email and surf the web a little, but want it fast).-You can pay for a slow speed and say 1 gig per month if you are a grandmother type (just emailing the kids/grandkids, etc)-You can pay for a slow speed and 100 gigs per month if you're a bulk.... "sharer" and just care about it getting down, now when it gets down-You can pay for fast and 235892389432 gigs per

Almost all internet service in Canada is already tiered and metered; Bell Canada provides (in Quebec) 30GB/mth with the connection, charges $1.50 per GB over that, and STILL throttles.

TekSavvy charges $30/mth for 5mbit down 800kbit up DSL, with 200GB cap, $0.25 per GB over (averaged over two months), or $10 for 100GB. There is also an unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth.

Pretty much everybody has caps/overage charges these days. Clearly the fact that ISPs are still throttling despite the incredibly low caps indicates that the throttling is about profit, not congestion.

But why should internet connectivity have to be like other services?When a core ISP buys fibre, whether or not the bandwidth is used on the fibre it still costs them the same (yes they can choose to make huge profits, but bear with me).

Electricity and water come from somewhere, if they aren't used it doesn't cost the suppliers the same.

Voice calls are typically priced by time and not by data transferred.

So why not:1) When there is contention "premium priority" traffic always takes precedence over "normal pr

Sure, they have transparent proxies FOR THEIR RETAIL CLIENTS.Not for anyone else. Even then most of them don't use the proxies for their "business" plans.

And they don't implement them for "load balencing", they get that (well, as close as you can) for free with BGP. They implement them because it saves money.

This is not about transparent proxies, they only affect unencrypted HTTP traffic. It's about low level QoS (Which should be OK if well implemented) or something more along the lines of the recent Comcas

You have no clue about what you are talking about. No doubt they do stuff like that in Australia but if you would have bothered to read the newsgroup threads on this at dslreports you would have found out that:

1. Bell is throttling P2P traffic between 4:30PM and 2AM. This affects BitTorrent and all other forms of P2P2. All other traffic is full speed3. All P2P is capped at about 30kbps between said hours

In fact this is exactly what they do to their own Sympatico users but now applied to all 3rd party resellers.

All blacklisted (or non-whitelisted, we're not sure yet) traffic is throttled to 60KB/s from 4PM to 5PM, and from 30KB per second from 5PM until 2AM.

There are two problems with your load-balancing allegation:

1) Load balancing would imply that provisioning of available bandwidth would be balanced, rather than limited to very specific thresholds2) Users reported that speeds were perfectly fine before throttling; the network was able to handle all load without throttling or balancing. In order for load balancing to make sense as an explanation, there would have to have been congestion.

Further problems are that when blacklisted traffic is detected (P2P, for example), the users' entire connection is throttled (killing off VoIP service even with QoS). If the user is using a whitelisted service (HTTP), no throttling is performed. This IS protocol-specific.

In late 2007 Bell/Sympatico started throttling p2p to 30KB/s between 5pm and 1am (when you're paying for a line capable of >400KB/s).

IMMEDIATELY all the technically savy customers (like me) **dumped** them and switched to TekSavvy and other competitors. It was only a matter of time before all of us managed to tell all of our friends and family, and bit by bit Bell's customer base was going to be EATEN ALIVE.

I DOUBT LIKE HELL there is actual congestion on Bell's common-infrastructure WAN links inside city limits, before they reach the point where it splits into the Bell-internal network and all the reseller's internal systems.

I GUARANTEE that Bell is just being cheap-asses with bandwidth to the net, and suddenly they discovered that their cheap-assness was NOT flying in the competitive market. So they've invented this reason to throttle everyone (since they control the common infrastructure - the "to the door" bits - that the CRTC *forces* them to re-sell at set rates to competitors).

BellSympaticoThink: "oh jeeze, we're getting raped by our competitors, maybe if we claim we're having congestion problems with the "fat ass pipe" that we're being forced to share with our competitors, then we'll have a level playing field? Yeah, fuck-em."

Now:

Customer----(fat ass pipe with packet shaping to make it suck as much as Sympatico)----PeeringPointForResellers------Competitor-----(fat ass pipe)----------Net

"there, now we won't loose any more customers".

FUCK SYMPATICO. I was being lazy about switching away from them, but now I'll do it just to save the $10 a month that the cheaper competition would save me.

PPS: I've been with BellSympatico 8 years, on their most expensive plan, and now I hate their guts and can't stand to pay them money. This is enough to make me want to drop my land line and go with VOIP, even if the latter is shitty quality and service.

I'm a Bell customer. It sounds like you're getting the same treatment I get. From ~4pm-2am p2p is throttled, often as low as 240kbps up/down. On bad days, ive seen it go under 96kbps up/down. Note I pay for a 5mbps 'unlimited' connection.

The only good thing I can say, is at least bell admits they're doing this. I mean it'd be pretty hard to deny it, but some companies try anyway.

I don't know about your country, but in Canada, there are regulations for DSL wholesalers. This is very much *illegal*. In either case, *my* ISP isn't providing the service they indicated, which includes no caps, no throttling, no port blocking, etc. I assume by "free", you mean "mutually agreed upon price"; I thus must disagree with your sentiment about the aforementioned lunch.

going by what i'm hearing from friends, it's practically everything except unencrypted HTTP and FTP traffic that's getting throttled. a friend of mine in toronto is extremely pissed off as her VOIP service appears to be getting throttled.

Unlike a highway which has a left hand lane for overtaking, the Internet is like a series of tubes through which data packets are propelled at relatively the same speed. When one type of packet starts taking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth, sometimes the tube owners decide to cut back on the number of tubes allotted to those packets and give more tube capacity to other types of packets. Flooding the tube system with any one type of packet degrades the user experience of all users. So it makes sense to protect the user experience of other types of packets by purposefully throttling the antagonist packet types.

What is the result of the throttling? Is it lost connections, or is it just a slowdown of service? If it is just slowdown, I don't think these bandwidth hoggers have a claim. OTOH, if they are losing connection midstream, they too have a right to the road, even if they need to obey a slower speedlimit.

Unlike a highway which has a left hand lane for overtaking, the Internet is like a series of tubes through which data packets are propelled at relatively the same speed.

So what you're saying is the Internet is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck? Well that explains why I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday.

In the case of a highway. A retailing company is leasing 2 roads, that go from A to B, from a wholesaler. One would imagine it would then sustain the approriate traffic a 2 lane road would during all times of the day. In fact the retailer makes this a selling point.

However in this case, the road doesn't terminate at B, it goes on to C (and so forth). The wholesaler also controls the flow of traffic from B to C (even if the distance is arbitrary or non-existant). Thus the wholesaler in this case is forcing the retailers two roadways to merge in one single lane during peak times.

This isn't about the end users clogging up the highways. This is about the unscrupulous merge sign put up during 'peak' times. The idea is the retailer leased two roadways, and they damn well want to use them. If there are too many cars creating a traffic jam, its up to the retailer to decide who gets to use the carpool lane etc.

On top of that, it would be quite surprising that the contact between the reseller and the wholesaler NOT explicitely say such a thing is unacceptable. Especially considering that they are in competition with each other, by narrowing down the flow, that's the next thing to unfair competition.What seems to have happened from my point of view, is that the wholesaler used to put the resellers before its own retail clients before, and now put everyone at the same level. I expect the wholesaler to be called be

Wholesalers like TekSavvy don't have an SLA with Bell. They merely have an SLO that states the levels of service that Bell will probably provide, but makes no guarantees about it one way or the other. It's unlikely that any sort of agreement between Bell and the wholesalers prevent this. It's more likely that CRTC regulations prevent this.

Some wholesalers actually do own A to B. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to colocate your own DSLAMs in the COs, which limits your coverage and reach. It does have the advantage of letting you pick your own profiles/technology (ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL, etc) since the wholesaler has access to the raw copper wire, and have zero interference since you're providing your own backhaul connection from the CO.

If it is advertised that I will get x number of tubes, and the contract I have signed with my ISP states that I will get x number of tubes, then goddamnit, I need to get x number of tubes. If your infrastructure is incapable of suppling all the people with the contracted number of tubes then you need to increase the capacity of your infrastructure. If your business plan was 'counting on users to not use the contractual number of tubes' then your business plan sucks and you should be penalized handily.If you

If you are speaking as an end user I recommend you read your contract and stop acting like it does not allow for shenanigans.They are usually VERY clear that you are paying for up to a certain number of tubes, and they will arbitrarily take away your maximum number of tubes if they decide you use them too much.

I'm not saying it's right, just that it is a little dis-ingenuous to pretend you didn't sign something that says I'll bend over and beg you for more.

I fully aware of varying different bandwidth caps between my computer and the rest of the Internet. It is part of the field I work in to know such things. That is not the problem.

Throttling all http connections while I'm using a bittorrent client is the problem. I have no empirical evidence at hand to show that even the bittorrent traffic is throttled. As soon as I make a bittorrent connection, all other protocols are throttled to zero throughput. When I close the bittorrent client all returns to normal. It's that simple. If my http download rate can hit the 3.5Mbps as advertised but bittorrent cannot, and while using bittorrent total bandwidth allowed seems to drop to some 56kbps... well, that is not protecting anyone, it is forcibly throttling my traffic. I can download ISOs using http connections ALL FUCKING DAY LONG... start one P2P connection and I get roughly 56kbps total. What is happening is NOT about managing bandwidth usage, it's about mangling P2P usage.

I would be just fine and happy if all I could get was 3.5Mbps all day long with any protocol. I'd happily share that among my vonage, internet radio, several computers etc. When I open the bittorrent client, all bandwidth is dropped to near nothing and http traffic and smtp traffic (as far as I can tell) are cut off.

So, what you think is merely bandwidth management is actually p2p mangling, pure and simple. This was not always the case, it is something new that TimeWarner has started recently. No, I do not download movies and music illegally, so it is me, the honest user who is inconvenienced by all these anti-file sharing methods. I am penalized by the dimwitted people who think they know how to stop the **AA from dying. It takes a great deal of effort not to take out large WSJ ads telling the **AA to fuck off and die right along with timewarner et al.

Sure, you can say that I signed the contract etc. but god damnit people, I signed up for 3.5Mbps without regard to protocol used. Thanks to my good fortune, in the nice area where I live it's Time Warner or satellite. I don't have a choice of three or four ISP's.

So what is a cable company supposed to do? So many customers, so big is the Internet. How are they to balance the traffic and needs? Well, I can tell you this, it's not nearly as difficult as they would like congress and the fcc to believe. If you promise 3.5Mbps, deliver it or discount the price! period!

If you bought a 1st class ticket to the Orient, and half way through the stewardess tells you that you have the share your seat with someone else and there will be no discount or rebate... well, you have every right to be pissed off. I'm paying for 3.5Mbps worth of room in the tube and I EXPECT to get that much. I don't want half a lane for my car, or a bike path, I want the full passenger vehicle lane width. If my family is in the damn car I don't want to be forced to use the back roads. It really is THAT simple.

If they want to throttle traffic and shape it, then fucking discount the price of the service. period. If you take your car to be worked on and pay for guaranteed workmanship, you don't want to find out later that the work was faulty, that oh, that doesn't apply to YOUR type of vehicle, whether it was in the fine print of the last page of the contract or not.

The tube analogy is a bad (tm) one. The internet is more like airports. There are small airports that fly into big hub airports. There is only so much room on an airplane. If the P2Petersons book 90% of the seats on the plane out of Poughkeepsie into Newark, then even though there are plenty of empty seats in Newark, the "bandwidth" from Poughkeepsie to Newark is crowded by the P2Petersons. In this case, the ISP only let's the P2Petersons have 25% of the seats on Newark bound planes. Wait no, the internet i

The core problem here is that there are no more "bandwidth hoggers". Bell's own service has a 30 GB per month cap, with $1.50 per gig over that cap. They're also removing the limit on the maximum overage charges (currently $30) on new customers June 30th.In short, users are already paying per-gig for what they use. Calling them a "bandwidth hog" despite the fact that they're paying Bell 50x cost for that bandwidth is incorrect.

The same is true when it comes to wholesalers; they pay Bell per-megabit for back

Well, in a series of tubes you get the Bernoulli effect and when a tube is throttled, the speed of the data increases and the pressure on the data flow decreases. The decrease in pressure can lead to the data boiling, causing cavitation. The cavitation and collapse of the data steam bubbles can cause severe damage to the tube walls...

I mentioned this in another thread but Rogers has figured out how to deal with the big downloaders; drop the cap level that you are allowed to download and start charging for anything over the cap. I wonder how long it will take before people move. Mind you, I think everyone else is doing the same thing (except Teksavvy)

drop the cap level that you are allowed to download and start charging for anything over the cap.

I think ISP's in Australia are a bit harsh in cropping speeds to 64kbps once the monthly limit is reached, as this is annoyingly slow. Instead they should cap to around 128kbps which allows for fairly useful day-to-day browsing and emails and VOIP calls whilst making P2P too annoyingly slow to contemplate. But in fairness, most ISP's here don't charge for excess traffic once it's shaped. You basically get what you pay for here, by and large, and you don't have to pay for what you don't need.

The question is, can anybody really provide unlimited throughput at $40 (or whatever) a month. With torrents, and a good connection it's easily possible to get download rates of 500 KB/s. With 2592000 seconds in a 30 day period, one could easily download 1200 GBytes every month. That's 1.2 terabits, and about 20 times the regular 60 GB cap I get on Rogers. Is it really feasible for them offer unlimited throughput, to all users as downloading videos becomes commonplace?

Teksavvy can and does. They have two options of 200G cap or for $10 more Unlimited. I heard about them last week on here and started investigating.Right now, I am mulling at going with them but according to the tech I would only getbetween 1 and 2M while now I am at 5.5M. However over the weekend random tests would show I was getting about 1.5M but this morning it peaked to 4.5M. However I gather you would be using Bell infrastructure which is why I may wait to see what the fallout of this article is befor

I strongly advise you not to touch a working DSL connection until Bell's labor dispute has been resolved. If you disconnect now, you probably will not get a working, new connection until sometime in December.

All the DSL providers in Ontario (which is where Teksavvy operates) use Bell Infrastructure because Bell had (and may still have) a monopoly* on the wires. CRTC may have forced them to allow other telecom companies to use the wires to provide voice and internet, but it hasn't forced them to play nice with them. Until recently, if you used a non Bell phone company you could not get DSL on that line. Bell would provide the voice line to the non Bell as per CRTC regulations, but it would be on its older swi

The other thing is that Bell gives lowest priority to any of the clients of the resellers. I worked for a law firm a while back and our internet conection was provided through a reseller. The DSL modem started getting flakey and it took 3 days and a call to Bell (who said they weren't supposed to be talking to us) and a threat of a lawsuit (these were lawyers) before they came in and replaced the modem which the tech said they were aware of having the problem we were experiencing.I may end up just sucking i

Yes, because it's a game of averages. TekSavvy pays about 3 cents per megabit for the unmetered customers. They're betting that the average customer uses less than 500GB/mth (their estimated break-even point at the $40 pricepoint). And since the average unlimited user used 118.47GB in January (please see the DSLR thread where TekSavvy's owner listed their average user bandwidth figures: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20029507-Rocky-DecJan-bandwidth-stats [dslreports.com]), that game of averages currently works in TekSavvy

I moved when my VPN sessions started getting hacked up because of that stupid Roger's "if we can't see the traffic, we'll throttle it just in case it might be p2p" move. I'm now at Teksavvy, which means I'm impacted by this too. No winning for me!

No, TekSavvy does have a cap, and does charge for overage. Of course, your $30/mth DSL line has a 200GB/mth cap, and overage is $0.10 to $0.25 (depending on if you pre-purchase a 100GB chunk or not). So they're really not discouraging heavy users, just trying to get a handle on the insanely-high users. Those users are encouraged to sign up for the unmetered cogent-only service for $40/mth. Same speeds, still have the ability to saturate your line, except you're on cogent instead of the normal multi-homed "p

I think the long-term solution is plain old IP, probably in the form of IPSEC. The network's job is to switch and deliver packets, not to extract information from the headers of higher-level protocols and use it to "manage" the network.

E.g., there was at some point an article about what Comcast does. They're not targetting the P2P ports or anything. They just look at which client opens a burst of connections at the same time and has a lot of connections going at the same time.

You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download. You know, all via the browser, plain old HTTP, on port 80.

Basically it's not as much targeting P2P, as just targeting everyone who doesn't behave like one user with a browser.

Because they're not as much hating P2P, as trying to keep the majority of moms and pops sending emails to their kids happy. Those guys don't open 20 connections at the same time, so they don't notice it.

The problem is, basically: The ISPs oversold the bandwidth _massively_, and I'm certainly not trying to defend that, but it would sorta work if everyone didn't use all that. Or if they all had the same number of connections, so they're all inconvenienced equally. P2P programs don't act like that. They keep opening bursts of connections until they saturate the pipe, everyone else be damned.

Think of the following example, basically. Let's say I'm lucky enough to have an 100 mbit/s Ethernet connection to my best buddy's ISP, and decide to share it with the whole neighbourhood. Essentially, I'd be a mini-ISP there. Now I don't want one guy saturating it all, so let's say I connect everyone to my hub via only 10 mbit/s Ethernet. I'd have enough bandwidth for 10 of them. But I figure most of them are old people and don't surf much, so I let 40 people connect there.

It's already oversold, but let's hope it works out.

Now if everyone used a browser and, say, 1 connection at a time, worst that can happen is that all 40 download a movie at the same time, and they all see 100/40 = 2.5 mbit/s bandwidth. That's only at peak times, so probably most will understand it, and some probably won't even do the maths there in the first place.

But then come some people with P2P clients. Those don't play that nice. If they don't get the whole 10mbit/s, everyone else be damned, they'll open more connections until they do. So now as little as a quarter of my users can saturate my whole backbone connection. The other 75% will suck air through a straw. Their 1 connection vs the two dozen connections of the P2P guys means they'll be happy if they see 100 kbit/s on their downloads. They can probably go brew a cup of coffee even while a simple site like Slashdot loads.

Now they _will_ complain.

That's the ISP's problem in a nutshell: P2P makes the traditional oversell no longer work. A minority of users running P2P stuff full time, can stuff everyone else's pipe, and massively amplify the effects of oversell for everyone else.

Not because it's P2P, but because it opens that burst of connections.

What can you do there?

1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.

2. Start charging per MB, and let free market economics solve who gets how much bandwidth. The moms and pops just reading their emails would probably pay cents, while if someone wants to download the whole internet, well, if they can afford it, why not? Downside, it would be extremely unpopular, and again it's a hole that their own marketing dug them in.

3. Target anyone who opens ridiculous numbers of connections, to stop them from squeezing everyone else out. Downside, it's easy to overdo it, and now P2P users will suck air through a straw and see analog modem speeds.

1. Stop overselling. That costs money, so I don't think the ISPs will do that any time soon. Especially since they dug themselves into a nasty hole where they advertised more and more bandwidth and lower and lower prices, and they can't afford to actually deliver that to everyone. The only way to do that is to raise prices.

Actually, this is the only thing that they should be doing as "overselling" can, and should, be treated as what it is: a rampant case of criminal business fraud. I am quite dismayed tha

I think you've missed the mark on why bittorrent at least is so revolutionary. Yes it can eat a lot of bandwidth, but for a large cable operator a large number of people are going to be on your own backbone not using any of your upstream bandwidth or at least using a lot less of it.

So from your perspective you have your 100meg connection with 100 million 10meg connections coming off of it, if they are copying from one to another then your 100meg feed is irrelevant and they will not be degrading the perfor

Doesn't work that way. For cable Internet the bottleneck is the upstream link from the subscriber's cable modem to the cable head-end. That upstream link's got only a fraction of the bandwidth the downstream link does, and's easy to saturate. And that's exactly the link that'd be hit when a subscriber downloads a file from another subscriber, because the download for the recipient is an upload for the machine hosting the file. And that upstream isn't per-customer, it's shared among all subscribers on a give

You'd get throttled just the same if you connected a large extended family or lan party via the same proxy/router to the 'net, and everyone tried to download 5 porn movies at the same time, and repeatedly reload Slashdot while they download.

4. Implement some kind of smart scheduling, so every user gets an equal chance at their share of bandwidth. So in my small neighbourhood ISP example, you'd see the same 2.5 mbit/s at peak hour regardless of whether you have 1 connection open or 100.

Now of course, the only honest solutions are #1 and #2, take your pick which you prefer.

What's so dishonest about #4? As a DSL customer (not an ISP) that approach seems perfectly reasonable to me, so long as the ISP is upfront about the average bandwidth th

Unfortunately, as you said, it would probably be rather unpopular at first, even though it's likely to be less expensive for most users than unmetered bandwidth.

I don't know what ISPs are like in your experience, but 'round here I can't imagine any of them switching to a pricing structure which sees the majority of their customers giving them less money every month.

If and when pay-per-MB broadband comes, expect the most basic package to cost at least as much as the current standard package costs right now.

Nice argument, nice presentation, totally based on bullshit.Connections and bandwith are not necessarily interconnected like you assume. Any moderately smart network appliance (e.g. Tomato for home routers) can measure bandwidth per source irrespective of the number of connections. So saying that the "big bad hacker" who opens 100 connections clogs the pipes for everyone is just spin doctoring the issue.

The other problem with your argument is that it is not only P2P programs that open flurries of connect

Your argument makes sense for some ISPs, but not for this specific situation:1) Teksavvy supplies it's own bandwidth, and only leases the 'last-mile' connection from Bell Canada.2) Teksavvy does oversell, but currently keeps up with it's traffic even at peak times.3) Bell is throttling P2P on Teksavvy's last-mile, even though it has little impact on their ability to provide service to it's own customers.4) The type of throttling they are doing is interfearing with QoS systems in routers that ensure VoIP works. It is causing reduced quality in VoIP services.5) Selectively throttling specific protocols is a slippery slope. What's to say that they don't decide that VoIP is the next service that gets eliminated because it competes with their local phone service?

This is a blatant attempt by Bell to remove a competitive advantage from competing ISPs.

Personally, I have no problem with #2. The problem I have is that they are still throttling bandwidth. I have no issue in paying a little more if I get the data I want as fast as I can get it.At any rate, to finally get back on topic, just randomizing ports and encrypting connections won't do much. As long as you still open two dozen connections, you can still be throttled just as well. The only way to be really stealthy there is if you make it all go to a centralized server, tunneled over a single connecti

I'd rather see something like the way OpenVPN can be setup to tunnel an encrypted connection over UDP packets as the transport mechanism. Hide all the TCP level details completely. I'd probably go even further and use a protocol like SCTP encrypted and tunneled over UDP.

At least this would stop the Comcast forged RST problem, but there's not much you could do if they just dropped these packets instead.

They just started to release their programs as torrents that are DRM FREE!!!!!

We hope you enjoyed tonight's show! As announced, CBC is happy to present Canada's Next Great Prime Minister to you as a DRM-free bittorrent file [www.cbc.ca] which you can download, share & enjoy. First, pick which file you want to download:

Xvid AVI at 720x486or264 MPEG-4 at 320x240

Maybe marketplace should do a story about Bell and Rogers regarding this throttling...

Why should they? You saw what happened when NIN tried to host their own free downloads, most people had a hell of a time getting them. Those of us who went to the Pirate Bay got them easily. The pirate bay (or mininova in this case it seems) are good at what they do, so let them do it.

The main point is that you should get exactly what you pay for. It is not necessary for ISPs to use high-tech solutions to specifically target torrent traffic, etc. Instead, all they need do is implement a data cap (you have a choice of different caps, each costing more) that instead of being month-based, applies to the last 30 days. Therefore no network problems with the entire user-base trying to use up their download cap (that's a cap, not a target) within the first week of the month. Instead, it's balan

My ISP (acanac) said they are considering setting up encrypted VPN's if they start running into this. At that point, all bell will see is a single encrypted connection type - so yes, very quickly, everything will become encrypted if they keep doing this.

They already have 200Gb of online storage and are setting up "online desktops" which are RDP connections to a fedora VM with a 16Mb connection as free services -so I wouldn't put it past them setting up free VPN connections for everyone.

I'm a Teksavvy client and very happy with them. You call up and still talk to a person who's actually a part of the company you're calling (in Chatham, Ontario). And quickly. I like the fact that when you talk to them they treat you like you're an intelligent person instead of just an account to be dealt with.

I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.

I know that the back end is still run by Bell and that the money I pay for dry DSL would probably mostly get passed on to that company anyway but at least I could trust that nobody could decide to add a long distance plan to my account without consulting me first.

My big concern with moving to voip-only is that Bell will abuse their position to degrade VoIP calls.

I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.

I'm also a very happy teksavvy customer, who moved to dry dsl + voip after bell pissed me off one too many times (By unilaterally, without notice adding an extra year of contract to my cell phone plan. Don't get me started...).

Since the service and support from teksavvy is so great (not that I often need support), I immediately asked them about their voip plans, and the teksavvy rep actually recommended against using their own voip service, saying it wasn't yet reliable enough (this was about 2 years ago,

Yeah, I kind of figured I'd get the shaft on the phone number. I really don't have the strength to argue with Bell any more. Between the horrid machine they _require_ you to talk to when you call them and the useless answers of the people you finally get through to I don't know if I'll even try to keep my number.

The voip service I use right now is from Les.net (another very helpful small Canadian company) and I think I would end up moving to just using that full-time. I already have one local number from

I switched from Bell to Teksavvy dry DSL + VoIP with BabyTel. Excellent quality since I enabled QoS on my own router (linksys with Tomato), and the service is A+.

I got to keep my phone number, but it cost me some $$: to be sure that the number is not reassigned before it is transfered, I followed these steps:1- sign up with Babytel2- send a "number portability" form, signed, by fax to Babytel3- wait 30 days for the move to be done4- profit! Bell cuts off my phone line automatically when the number is gone.

Total cost: 1 month's fees due to the overlap (25$ Bell line + 12$ for the Babytel line).

Total hassle: fill and fax 1 form, email twice to Babytel to know the procedure and confirm.

Total time spent with Bell: no phone, no mail, just the final bill for the amount of 0$.

Total time spent with Bell: no phone, no mail, just the final bill for the amount of 0$.

I like the sound of that. The rates at Babytel look higher than what I get from Les.net but Babytel looks like a full-service outfit instead of just the basic access that I want. I wonder if Les.net does the same number porting thing. I'm going to look into that - especially if it means I don't have to call Bell myself.

Of course you have to know that since your DSL is supplied over Bell's lines you're really still at their mercy in the end.

I'm also a Teksavvy customer, a new one but out in BC, and using Telus as a back bone. I have some serious issues with my line, I moved from an old provider who was giving me 1.5 mbits/down and 640 kbits up, to Teksavvy's 3 down 1 up service (for $40 LESS a month) and the phone lines are giving me problems. Sure speedtest.net is reporting 1.8 down and 288 up but sustained its more like 640 down and 100 up. When I talked to Teksavvy customer support they've always treated me as intelligent and are houndin

Didn't know they went all the way out to BC. Seriously, when I got started with them I bought a modem, screwed it up and I remember very clearly that I talked to Steve when I called them up. He's the guy that answered the phone after a couple rings and he told me what settings I'd need in Hyperterminal to connect to this modem in debug mode so I could recover it. This isn't a modem they sold me - they recommended it but I bought it used from a computer shop.

They currently service Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. They're shortly going to expand to Bell Aliant territory, which would include (I believe) Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador. At that point, TekSavvy will service eight provinces.

I'm a Teksavvy customer, and my biggest frustration thus far has nothing to do with their company at all, but rather that any ADSL provider in the area (North York/Toronto, Ontario) needs to use Bell's lines. This means that Bell gets to tack on an extra charge to my bill, but there doesn't seem to be any requirement from them to provide a decent level of service.

In my case, after the initial (dry-loop) connection is made, *I* have to pay for any future Bell calls. Further to that, I have a straight run t

I get that you're probably joking but QoS can make a huge difference from what I understand. And there are cases where providers have decided not to honour the QoS flags on voip protocols. Coincidentally these providers also have a voip offering of their own where they don't have a problem meeting QoS needs.

because I've been waiting for a proper Canadian thread to use that joke

The number of people in Canada who use "eh" in their sentences is probably about the same number of people in the US who are in the habit of saying "y'all". I've lived half my life on each side of the border, and I probably couldn't use up my fingers counting the numbers I've personally known belonging to either category.

In much the same way that most folks in the US feel no ongoing need to distinguish themselves from their Southern, Ap

The problem isn't a company that wants to harass P2P users here (though that could potentially be a problem with many ISP's in the future, particularly Comcast and other ISP's who could be bought off with Hollywood cash), the problem are companies like Bell, AT&T, etc. who have oversold bandwidth while not building up their infrastructure to match. In other words, they've sat on their asses and not build up their networks and backbones the way they should have been doing, all while continuing to promise "unlimited" bandwidth--and now they're mouths are writing checks their asses can't cash.

Mod me offtopic if you want, I think its funny that every article that comes across has the "censorship" tag. This, again, really isn't censorship. They're not censoring anything from you. They are not saying you can't look at something. They are just prioritizing their traffic. Again, not saying they are right in doing so, but its not censorship.

It depends how the reselling is implemented. An ISP in Australia could be an AAPT, Optus, or Telstra reseller, which means the wholesaler manages just about everything and the reseller puts their logo on the service and (maybe) handles first line support, and possible does some value adding or something.Alternatively, the ISP may buy bandwidth from their upstream wholesaler, and manage their own DSLAM's, authentication, etc.

As you say, too many unanswered questions to form an informed opinion. That doesn't

perhaps making a stand against wholesalers overselling their allotted bandwidth.I always though that ISP's bought bandwidth based on the capacity of the interconnect such as a 100Mbs 100BaseT in the datacenter or an OC48 or whatever and by the total traffic transfered per time period. If the ISP went over in the total transfer, they were charged a permium rate for the excess. If an ISP can't get these classical terms from a tier 1 provider, it looks like we are all screwed.

When is the last time you hadn't thrown your vote away? Ron Paul even if its write-in!

You realize that for write-in votes to count that the candidate has to have filed his candidacy with the appropriate agencies (typically the State Board of Elections), right? For President he would also have to file a slate of Electors to cast votes for him in the Electoral College. He's on record as saying he has no intention of doing either of these things, so I'm honestly at a loss for why it wouldn't be "throwing your vote away" to vote for him -- if you really believe in his message then vote for

Teksavvy owns their own network but data still goes over Bell's infrastructure. However, Teksavvy pays bell for this as per their contract with Bell which AFAIK does not say anything about traffic shaping. Heavy customers are leaving Bell in droves to go to Teksavvy and other ISPs who give them a realistic amount of data transfer per month. Bell gives you 60GB(30up, 30 down or something like that) and Teksavvy gives you 200GB total for LESS MONEY than Bell. The decision is easy, go with Teksavvy over Be

Bell installs the DSLAMs. The DSLAMs connect to the Bell network. Various ISPs connect their backhauls to the Bell network, and their DSL customer's PPPoE sessions hit the Bell DSLAM, then are popped over to the appropriate ISP's backhaul, and thence to their network.

What Bell is doing, more or less, is throttling at the DSLAM, rather than throttling at their own edge.

I complained to the CRTC this morning about shaping the traffic they wholesale resell. I agree that Bell should be able to throttle their own customers as much as they like. But the whole point of forcing them to resell their network access was to create competition -- to give us our choice about what ISP offers which features that we like. But now they are throttling their competition. We don't have a choice. Everyone touched by this should be complaining to the CRTC about this.